Filmmaker Cullen Hoback's Terms and Conditions May Apply offers an urgent, unsettling, and timely portrait of digital-age surveillance (the Edward Snowden case, which revealed massive online spying perpetrated by the NSA, appears in an epilogue here over the closing credits). This exposé finds Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other popular online sites and services complicit (and occasionally duplicitous) in collecting user data and selling it to ready bidders—ranging from marketing agencies to companies that red-flag health-insurance seekers. By far, the most ominous exploitation of unknowing netizens (who sign away personal information when accepting terms-and-conditions agreements) comes from the government and law enforcement. George W. Bush's Patriot Act ushered in a new age of spying on e-mail (even unsent drafts), text-messages, social-media postings, and Internet searches. "Privacy is dead," one interviewee flatly proposes, and there are anecdotes here of scriptwriters, children, and comedians who were subject to post-9/11 investigation because police monitored and misinterpreted their online activities. Good guys (more or less) in this otherwise depressingly lopsided us-vs.-them battle include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and comic-turned-politician Al Franken, who became a whistleblower on one of the insidious methods by which cell- and smartphone data is gathered and sold (the documentary also recaps the phone-hacking crimes conducted by affiliates of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media conglomerate). Authors interviewed here include Siva Vaidhyanathan (The Googlization of Everything), Eli Pariser, WIRED editor Chris Anderson, Margaret Atwood, and Orson Scott Card. Featuring both the full-length film and a 58-minute abridged version, this documentary makes a fine companion to Dave Eggers' bestselling similarly-themed latest novel, The Circle. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)
Terms and Conditions May Apply
(2013) 79 min. DVD: $95: high schools & public libraries; $295 w/PPR: colleges & universities. Ro*co Films Educational (<a href="http://www.rocoeducational.com/">www.rocoeducational.com</a>) March 10, 2014
Terms and Conditions May Apply
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